By Adela Halo
The Albanian government seems to remain adamant to file the application for candidate status very soon. Several EU representatives have expressed, at times cautiously and at times explicitly, their stance not in favour of the application. Albanian media has been excellent at never missing a statement, at never failing to report them, almost verbatim. What we have all failed to do is to seriously engage with this question by looking at the essence of the matter. And that is not the actual date, the actual time when the application is filed. The application for EU candidate status is only secondarily a question of time.
As timeliness is always context-bound, all discussions focusing on it must be understood by reference to the context. As much else in politics, the circumstance that defines the timeliness of the application now is the June 28th – the upcoming elections. For the ruling majority, it is timely to file the application now in order to present the constituency with a winning package for votes – full fledged NATO membership and EU membership in the process. Likewise, it may be safe to assert that the Socialist Party’s encouragement last year to file the application was election-driven. In the months until June 2009, a negative response may have been wished for. Even the absence of a response, usually taken to be a cautious rejection, avoiding the utter of an explicit ‘no’ until better conditions, would have presented a great detriment to the ruling majority’s campaign. Clearly, both the ruling majority and the opposition are guided by short-term and short-sighted aims in their considerations of the application for candidate status – winning the elections.
A successful application of Albania, however, is not so much about timeliness as it is about reforms. Likewise, Albania’s upcoming elections are not so much about the application for candidate status as they are about Albania’s own development. Both the conduct and the results of the free and fair elections that the country has yet to experience ought to be very much about reforms, about achievements. The ruckus about the time of the application in fact, only obscures real concerns and what should be the backbone of current debate – economic development, education, health, infrastructure, and above all rule of law. The mere filing of an application is not progress in itself, it will not change the situation with these concerns in Albania.
